Street dishes to savour, colourful coasts to relax at and cool cities to explore, it’s been another year of exploring. Here, we pick our favourite stories of the year. Warning: contains holiday romances gone wrong!

For an experience of Portugal away from the droves of tourists that go there every summer, we headed to its central coast, where the Atlantic roars into empty beaches lined with delicious seafood restaurants.

Portugal’s Centro region is baffling. It’s between Lisbon and Porto, thus easy to get to and easy to get around. It has peerless beaches, a treasury of gorgeous historic towns and villages, and endlessly lovely people. The pristine coastline, horizons and skies go on forever. Yet there’s almost nobody here …

For what was one of our most popular features this year, we asked writers to share their favourite walks to get you outdoors this autumn and winter – the only condition? Every walk must include a pub.

Autumn’s true glories are experienced through trees: the turning of leaves from greens to fiery yellows and reds; the wine-black clusters of berries and nuts on drooping branches; the musty smell of leaf litter as shafts of sun streak the damp earth.From Nidd Gorge, North Yorkshire entry

From a bone-breaking encounter with a hot Greek waiter, to unrequited love in Anglesey, Wales, we asked writers to share their heartbreaking, toe-curling and painful, travel fails.

I proposed in Angkor Wat at dawn on my girlfriend’s birthday. We decided to celebrate by going on an early – pre-marriage – honeymoon to Luang Prabang. We’d save on the airfares if we did it now, I argued. We wafted around the gilded wats and the colonial villas of the ancient Laos capital for a couple of days in a fug of love. Then …From There were three in the bed … entry

In a city where the lanes in bowling alleys are laced with gunpowder, writer Vicky Baker travelled to Bogotá to experience a nightlife scene that sees you skipping between drag clubs and record bars, beer gardens to basement dive bars to a soundtrack of rock, salsa and cumbia.

I experienced my first tejo game on a trip to Bogotá, after calling on Andrés Martínez, a musician with electro-cumbia band Monareta, to show me some highlights of his hometown. It turned out to be one of the best nights I have ever had in an unknown city.

It may not be the most popular corner of south-west Ireland but Philip Watson visited the remote Beara peninsular anyway, finding a beautiful, rugged travel gem with stone circles and cosy bars.

The vast majority of visitors head out to foodie West Cork, loop round the famous Ring of Kerry, or strike out for Dingle and its resident dolphin. They bypass, however, the best bit in between: the beautiful Beara peninsula, Ireland’s foremost hidden travel gem.

Sunset over the Portland, Oregon Old Town sign in downtown Portland. Photograph: Alamy

Our guide to the hip (too hip!?) West Coast city, where you can indulge in plenty of art and alternative culture in between breakfast, brunch, lunch and street food.

The city of roses is also a city of protest – against police brutality, against Trump. Its many bridges across the Willamette river give it an industrial look, yet it is surrounded by lush Oregon landscapes, with Mount Hood, the Columbia river gorge and Cascade mountains a short drive away.

With tips from Vietnam’s islands to central Laos, we asked writers to share their favourite spots across sout-east Asia to help you discover the hidden treasures that could make your next escape.

Nan province is rich in natural beauty, as its national parks can attest. Arguably the most famous national park – Doi Khu Pha – offers the province’s highest mountain and a smattering of villages featuring the Mien, Lu, Hmong and Htin tribes: ethnic groups uncommon in the rest of Thailand.

Writer Shaun Pett headed 100km off the coast of British Columbia, to explore a set of remote islands with no roads or trails, that you can only explore by sea.

As the eight of us load gear and food for a week, Pincock distills his 36 years of paddling experience in the area into a series of orientations on everything from eating lunch to water safety. The details are necessary, he says, “because we’re taking single-human-powered craft on to the edge of the largest ocean on Earth”.

Taking a family holiday to an island populated with Asia’s highest concentration of brown bears seems like a risky choice. Michael Booth put his campervan to the test ...

Looking back, The Revenant was an ill-advised choice of in-flight entertainment. The image of Leo having his guts ripped out by a bear was still on my mind at 3am on our first night camping in the wilds of Hokkaido, when I finally squeezed out of my camper van bunk and tiptoed outside to the loo, twitching like a meerkat at every rustle from the undergrowth.